The blog life is certainly not the blaaaahg life…time goes by so quickly I’m mildly shocked when I look and see that close to two weeks have passed since my last post. Perhaps I should be making excuses, but really there are only two – I haven’t sat down and written – Just Do It! goes the post-new-year dieter’s mantra – and I’ve been preparing for the birth of a second blog which I got up and running today. May seem a bit traitorsome to some, a little narcistic to others (I mean, how much more could I have to say), but the second blog, at http://bosqueternosa.wordpress.com is the culmination of a writing project I’ve been working on for a few months for the Bosqueterno S.A. organization here in Monteverde.

Rather than explain that too much (since I have spoken about Bosqueterno and my writing job numerous times on this blog) , I’ll ask you to go there and check out the sweet newness of it, the innocence, the hope lingering in its postlessness. And, as the first little communique pleads, make a comment, ask a question, request something – anything! It’ll be so exciting for those of us behind the wordpress dashboard to get an early response.

I’ve been getting all my little cloud forest ducks in a row waiting to put together the blog – write the script, get approval from the Bosqueterno board, find the pictures, focus, sign up for blog (with its many design decisions to be made) – the next step is to keep filling it in with all that approved written fodder, and then to prepare a powerpoint presentation. This is meant to accompany the blog, teaching local guides, teachers and Monteverde Reserve employees about the unique history of the Bosqueterno S.A. land that has been left in the wet dust of the Bosqueterno de los Niños, a more well-known local reserve owned by the Monteverde Conservation League, and the big Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve that leases the Bosqueterno land. Now that I’ve got lots of photos digitalized, the rest is just writing, posting and editing, and eventually speaking, which is the easiest part for me.

In the meantime….

Went and saw Costa Rican rocker Pato Barraza – at our new fav bar Mata ‘e Caña – was a good night of latin rock, a bitta reggae, seeing some friends…will head out again tonight, after I finish this, to do some salsa dancing with Roberto and the local band, Los Maletines – who play a very sweet Cuban salsa and more. Roberto is still here, tho we keep talking about him leaving, but now that the weather on the mountain has got calmer, hotter, and sunnier, he’s loath to go…but the day will arrive soon. In the meantime, bailamos!

I spent a wonderful evening at my friend Turid Forsyth’s with two German friends of hers, Sepp and Reto. They are keen hikers and so I shared some of my hiking knowledge of the area, made some recommendations on how to get over to the volcano Arenal by foot – if you have a few days and the equipment, you can walk the Tapir Trail that Wolf created (which appears in the last chapter of Walking with Wolf); or you can go over to the Monteverde Conservation League’s San Gerardo Research Station, spend the night keeping an eye out for a good nocturnal lava-lit eruption from the volcano, and then keep walking down to Lake Arenal, but permission from the League is necessary – you pay for your room and board at the station which is inexpensive. The problem arises when the League insists that you have two guides to accompany you on your hike through their land to the lake. When Sepp and Reto went to set this up, there weren’t two guides available and the League wouldn’t allow them through without.

So option three is to go to the Mirador, on the far side of Santa Elena, and hike on the horse trails there. Which is what they did in the end, making the trip down to the lakeside in five hours. If the weather is good like we’ve had these days, you are blessed with a spectacular scene, the lake and volcano right in front of you all the way.

Over the years, the volcanos here in Costa Rica have done some damage, and there have been some nasty earthquakes as well, but while this sweet world spins around us with a minimum of pain these days, elsewhere people are really suffering. That incredibly destructive earthquake hit Haiti this last week – not just one assault, but a few – and so for a few short moments, the world’s sympathy, money and thoughts are with the Haitians. One must ask how one half of a small island could sustain such injury while the other half, the Dominican Republic, could escape basically unscathed. One must ask how much more pain and destruction one colony of people can survive – even a people as strong as the Haitians – descendants of slaves who stood their ground against the huge powers of the time (France, Spain, Britain, the US) to become the first independant black nation in the western world. And one must ask if there is any justice, truly, in this world.

I’ve been following on the internet (since we live without television – only Costa Rican papers, which tend to be rather lightweight, and radio, which Roberto feeds on) – and I have to say I’ve learned a new appreciation of Facebook – which can be seen as an addiction, a kind of social drunken cyber-cocktail party without the juice, as a never-ending game of mind-wasting solitaire, as many things – but what it has shown me lately is that it is an agent for sharing information – especially the kind that the mainstream media doesn’t indulge in. Marshall McLuhan, famous Canadian media theorist from the days when the reality of what television would really mean one day was just mist on the horizon, said that the medium would be the message… and that what we were fed and how we were fed it would influence our collective thinking. That has definitely come to pass, and now the Facehood, amongst other cyber-social-networking schemes, has brought us the ability to share information that the powers don’t want to necessarily give us, which the media isn’t telling because they are owned by corporations with agendas. Alternative media may not be the absolute truth all the time either, but it gives us the sensation of a little thorn in our sides, poking, making us question – just what the hell is going on? And giving us the opportunity to dig deeper, just like the old Mother Jones, New Internationalist, and Utne Reader mags of yesteryore.

Some of us are drawn there naturally, some of us have to be provoked. As long as we continue to question authority, at least we might arrive somewhere where truth prevails. Not necessarily, because truth can be ethereal at times, but we each have the ability, and the source, in our hearts to search for it. And from there, if we are paying attention, and have the luxury of choice in our lives, we can choose to follow the road that feels right – or turns left. Hold on to the light, Haiti, hopefully the help that is coming your way will be without strings or strong ropes attached and will help you not just rebuild, but be stronger than ever before.